Henninger: The Romney Reboot Arrives

In a role reversal, Mitt Romney went on offense and put Barack Obama on defense for 90 minutes.

By

Daniel Henninger

October 3, 2012

Barring revelations by the Obama campaign that Mitt Romney has an identical twin, whoever that guy representing the GOP ticket was in Denver has just given the United States a real presidential election. At last.

It would be asking too much for anyone to believe that the Romney campaign planned to spend two years saying very little about the substance of public policy as a ruse to anesthetize Barack Obama on debate night, but that is clearly what happened.

ENLARGE

Associated Press

Gov. Romney came to the debate prepared to press Mr. Obama in detail about the president's record, to defend the substance of his own proposals and even draw sharp philosophical distinctions with Mr. Obama. We're happy to tip a hat to his pre-debate sparring partner, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, but this level of competence and detail wasn't acquired in the past 10 days.

We may all wonder why he waited until now to liberate the real Mitt, but five weeks from election day, that question is beside the point and behind us.

This is the candidate, and he proved in Denver he deserves to be the candidate. At last.

It is safe to say that no one expected or predicted that Barack Obama could be so pushed off his game or look so flustered in a contest of articulating ideas. What happened?

Barack Obama showed the dangers and risks of presidential incumbency. For all the powers of the office, the U.S. presidency inevitably causes the person holding it to place outsized belief and faith in the correctness of his own policies and ideas. In a word, hubris. It has happened before.

Barack Obama, perhaps the most self-confident person to occupy that office in our lifetime, was always skating along the edge of a cliff of self-destructive arrogance. No other president would have thought to berate the members of the Supreme Court as they sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech. The famous George Washington University speech in which he ridiculed his Republican partners in the deficit-negotiation talks, who had come to the speech expecting to hear a policy response, was another sign of potential danger.

And finally there was the report a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama did not respect Gov. Romney and did not consider him competent to be president.

This is a president, dismissive and condescending to any opposition, who went into that debate in Denver and essentially got his head handed to him by a better-prepared opponent.

What was especially damaging to Mr. Obama is that when it became clear early in the initial discussion of tax policy that Mitt Romney was going to take his argument to a deeper level, the president's response was essentially to start cutting and pasting stock lines from speeches he's been giving for years. After awhile, he looked like a guy who was rummaging through a drawer for old audio cassettes. "The oil industry gets $4 billion a year in corporate welfare." He even rolled out the corporate jets.

The president sounded like someone who had simply run out of ideas. His challenger was elaborating detail on his policies, and the president was the candidate living in the past. His references to what he would do with a second term were minimal. Instead, he had to spend most of the 90 minutes trying to defend his policies from Mr. Romney's critique.

This was most notable on the biggest issue of all— the future of ObamaCare. Mr. Obama's defense of the 15-member review board came down to citing some process reforms at the Cleveland Clinic. Gov. Romney immediately turned that around as an example of a private institution experimenting its way toward new ideas—a difference of policy and philosophy.

Not least, Mr. Romney has finally found his way to a workable defense of his Massachusetts health-care plan, emphasizing that whatever its merits, it was a major legislation that was passed on a bipartisan basis. Mr. Obama was left muttering that the Washington GOP should have taken cues from Massachusetts.

The debate ultimately produced a reversal of expectations and roles. Based on past performances, it was Mitt Romney who should have been scattershot in his discussion and defensive about his ideas. He's always been defensive about his ideas. Instead, it was Gov. Romney on offense and the president on defense for most of the debate.

Mitt Romney may not have won the election in the first debate, but he established a new baseline. In 90 minutes in Denver, Mr. Romney finally aligned himself with the political zeitgeist of the electorate. They have wanted to know more about his plans. They wanted to know why he thinks their current president has failed and what he'd do differently. Now they do.

Will it last? It would be passing strange, even a little weird, if Mr. Romney reverted to a candidacy skimming along the surface of issues and arguments. He can go deep. He should keep doing it. Besides as he said minutes into the debate, "It's fun, isn't it?" It is. Give the voters more of it.

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